Google to Discontinue Quickoffice and Orkut in the Near Future

Google bought Quickoffice in June 2012 and released its own Quickoffice smartphone app shortly after. But with the release of standalone apps Google Docs and Google Sheets (Google Slides to follow), the folks at Mountain View decided to discontinue the Quickoffice app and will unpublish it from Google Play and the iTunes App Store "in the coming weeks".

However, ardent fans of the app need not worry as existing users can continue to use it, but there will not be any new features or bug fixes to be rolled out in the future. New users will also not be able to download the app.

A few days after this announcement, Google is also pulling the plug on their social network service Orkut. It is unlikely that any of us in Singapore are active users, as the service is popular mainly in Brazil, India and Japan. It debuted 10 years ago and is now making way for other Google social networks such as YouTube, Blogger and Google+.

The service will shut down on September 30 and users can continue to use the community services till then. Data such as profile information, community posts and photos can be exported using Google Takeout. No more Orkut accounts can be created from today. An archive of all public communities on Orkut will be archived and available online on the same day the service terminates. Users who do not wish to have their posts or names included in the archive will have to remove Orkut permanently from their Google accounts.